Monday, May 26, 2014

By Lisabet Sarai

Our topic for the coming fortnight is "Near Death Experiences". I hate to recycle posts, but this one is so appropriate, I couldn't resist. Besides almost all the members of the Grip have changed since April 2012 when this post appeared!

We went to Peru because, that winter,
there was no snow in Austria. That fact scuttled our original
vacation plans for a ski holiday. Hustling to find an alternative
(I'd already secured time off from my job), we found a relatively
cheap package tour to Lima. We'd had positive experiences traveling
with this tour company to Jamaica. They provided airfare and lodging
at a ridiculously low cost, then made their money on extras. In
Jamaica it had been easy to use the hotel as a base for exploring on
our own. We found out a bit late that Peru was a different sort of
place altogether.

It was the early eighties, and quite
frankly, the country was a mess. Vicious bands of Shining Path
guerillas made overland transit perilous. Strikes and civil unrest
occurred on an almost daily basis. At Lima Airport, we waited three
hours for our luggage because the baggage handlers had stopped work.
Rolling electricity outages afflicted the city of Lima, many regions
of which we were advised to avoid due to the danger of being mugged
or worse. Aside from the amazing gold museum, there wasn't much to
see in Peruvian capital. In any case, we had loftier goals: Cusco and
Machu Picchu.

The only practical way to Cusco was by
air, and that turned out to be almost as expensive as our flight from
the U.S. Nevertheless, we decided to bite the bullet and bought
non-refundable round trip tickets to the old Incan capital nestled in
the Andes.

Arriving in Cusco, we were informed
that the narrow gauge railroad to Machu Picchu had been out of
service for three weeks, due to a combination of rainy season
mudslides and another strike. Apparently the strike had been settled,
but it still wasn't clear whether the trains were running. We were
devastated. Cusco was an astonishing place in its own right, but to
come all that way and not get to see the fabled Incan terraces and
the Temple of the Sun...!

Two days before we were scheduled to
return to Lima, our guide told us we could catch the Machu Picchu
train the following morning. We were up at six AM (a real sacrifice
for my husband!) and on the train by seven. By ten AM we still hadn't
left; there were new landslides blocking the tracks, we learned, that
had to be cleared. When the train finally crawled out of the station,
we cheered – but prematurely, as we were halted by a slide after an
hour. Bulldozers were mustered, mud was cleared, the train proceeded
for an hour or two, before our way was blocked once again.

Normally the trip from Cusco to the
base of Huayna Picchu (only fifty miles!) takes about four hours. In
our case, we didn't arrive until after four in the afternoon. The
heart-stopping bus ride up the steep mountain flank, along the Hiram
Bingham Highway, required another half hour. And the ruins closed at
five thirty.

So we had less than an hour to explore
one of the great wonders of the world. It was worth the journey, but
way too short. Some members of the tour planned to stay over at the
mountain-peak guest house, but our plane back to Lima left the next
morning and we were worried about losing our money. In addition, my
husband was showing signs of the flu. We climbed back into the bus,
trundled down the side of the cliff and onto the train, and –
waited.

The locomotive finally inched forward,
into the inky darkness. We hadn't eaten. My husband's forehead felt
hot enough to fry an egg. Although we were both exhausted, the hard
wooden benches on the train were not really conducive to sleeping. I
remember that trip as a kind of endless hell – creeping along the
tracks that clung to the mountain side, the rain-swelled Urabamba
River audible even though it was seventy feet below us. We'd stop for
obstacles, wait, move, stop... My husband was hallucinating. I could
have believed it was all a dream myself if I hadn't been so
physically uncomfortable.

I finally must have drifted off into
some kind of slumber, when an awful roar yanked me awake. The train
lurched to a stop, throwing us to the sticky floor. It sounded as a
building was collapsing around us.

The terrible racket finally stopped.
Echoes of the tumult died away. Along with some of the other
passengers, I stepped off the train to check out the situation.

A massive wall of steaming mud blocked
the tracks, less than ten feet in front of the locomotive. Trees
poked out of the muck at weird angles. Boulders twice as large as the
stones of the Incan temples lay scattered on the narrow shelf the
builders of the railroad had cut into the mountain side. As I stared
in disbelief at the debris, a few more clods and pebbles clattered
down from the heights on the right. Far below us, at the bottom of
the cliff on the left, the rapids of the Urabamba seethed and boiled.

The railroad crew hurried us back into
the train. I was in shock. If the slope had given way thirty seconds
later, the train would have been buried. We might well have been
swept off the track into the river coiling below.

My husband had fallen into an uneasy
sleep, moaning and tossing on the unforgiving seats. As for me, I
didn't close my eyes. I heard the grunt of the earth moving equipment
they somehow managed to convey from further up the route, the shouts
of the workmen, the background mutter of the swollen river. I was
awake when the train nudged forward, rocking on its earth-dented
tracks. I kept watch on my beloved, giving him water, praying his
fever would break. I stared out the open window into the black night,
not quite sure we'd really survived.

I watched dawn turn the terra-cotta
roofs of Cusco from gray to red as we crawled down, back into the
valley. We could have died. With a smidge less luck, we might have
been lost in the Urabamba.

As the sun rose over the ancient city
of the Incas, I found it hard to believe. I still do. Maybe the old
gods were protecting us. Or maybe, that time at least, we were just
lucky.

You've had such an adventurous life. Imagine if your young self in high school, filled with young girl angst and struggling with eating issues could have known she would have had such a future to look forward to as you have had. And I can imagine your husband waking up in a safe place with no idea how close he came to being killed in his delirium.

You and I. We're becoming so much like an old rock and roll band, two of the founding members, muddling along and new line ups coming and going and somehow we keep chugging along.

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